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Today:
Giant ‘Gullies’ in the Earth Threaten Cities in Africa amid Rapid Urbanization
NEWS | 01 September 2025
A view of a deep urban gully in Kamonia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. More than 3,000 people are at risk of this gully expanding. Vanmaercke and his colleagues used satellite images taken between 2021 and 2023 to identify 2,922 urban gullies in 26 of 47 cities, covering a cumulative distance of nearly 740 kilometres. Two days later, several of her children were killed while sheltering at a relative’s house, when an expanding gully collapsed overnight. Investment neededAs African cities expand, the threat of expanding gullies is likely to increase.

Top Stories:
Neglecton Particles Could Be Key to More Stable Quantum Computers
NEWS | 01 September 2025
These particles could open a new pathway toward experimentally realizing universal topological quantum computers. Aaron Lauda's mathematical notation for his research study "Universal quantum computation using Ising anyons from a non-semisimple topological quantum field theory" on a chalkboard. Because braiding anyons changes the quantum state of the qubit, the procedure can be used as a quantum gate. This braid-based logic is the foundation of how topological quantum computers compute. By finding a way to make sense of them instead of discarding them, Lauda’s team unlocked an unexplored area of quantum theory.

World:
Voting Integrity Messages Fight Misinformation in the Lab. But What about the Real World?
NEWS | 01 September 2025
Telling voters such simple facts helps combat election misinformation, suggests a Science Advances study released on Friday. As a control measure, some participants heard messages with information that was entirely unrelated to voting. Prebunking worked in both the U.S. and Brazil, and it was particularly effective among those most skeptical of election security and had a more lasting effect. Notably, the U.S. voting security information was taken from the (now deleted) “Rumor vs. Reality” section of the website of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. Somewhat surprisingly, the prebunking messages without the forewarnings about conspiracy theories proved most effective in countering misinformation, the study showed.

Sponsored:
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SPONSORED | 01 September 2025
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Current Events:
U.S. Science Has Weathered Attacks Before and Won
NEWS | 01 September 2025
Worth recalling in this anniversary year, one of Scientific American’s proudest moments came in a past era of attacks on science. But a war on scientists not toeing the political line was in full swing then, and Scientific American was in the thick of it. This scientists-as-writers approach came about by happenstance, Scientific American editor Gary Stix found while researching the history of the magazine. “Scientific American runs to the sort of stuff which the Soviets would like to see in a popular science journal,” claimed an AEC memorandum that same year. This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

News Flash:
180 Years of Standing Up for Science
NEWS | 01 September 2025
I have been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old. Of course, SETI is still searching, and my name is on this page, not among the world’s great scientists. I was lucky to grow up in a time when science was celebrated and great communicators told American children that science was not only a worthy career but also exciting and cool. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. It’s an extraordinary example of the way that science can make the world a better place.

Latest:
New Treatments Can Free Kids from the Deadly Threat of Peanut Allergy
NEWS | 01 September 2025
“One out of 10 individuals in the U.S., more than 33 million, has a food allergy,” says Sung Poblete, CEO of Food Allergy Research and Education, an advocacy organization. Based on those results, and anticipating more data, the FDA immediately approved Xolair as a protection against peanut allergy. The results revealed that the occurrence of peanut allergy in Israeli kids was one-tenth the rate among U.K. ones. The babies were tested for preexisting peanut allergy, and if they were negative, they went into one of two groups. But “an allergist isn’t going to see somebody who doesn’t have peanut allergy already,” NIH’s Fulkerson says.

Breaking:
What Happens When an Entire Scientific Field Changes Its Mind
NEWS | 01 September 2025
The image of scientific rebels forcing other researchers to reverse themselves was codified in philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Physics as a field of knowledge has existed at least since the times of Greek savant Thales (circa 625–545 B.C.E.). In the early 1970s the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society launched the Breast Cancer Detection Demonstration Project (BCDDP) to test the potential of large-scale mammography. The American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiology, and other medical groups conceded that there weren’t good data to support under-50 mammography. As for reversals in fields where scientific ideas compete in disciplines that lack adequate investigatory tools, who knows?

Trending:
How Scientists Finally Learned That Nerves Regrow
NEWS | 01 September 2025
In recent decades this knowledge has inspired promising treatments for nerve injuries and has led researchers to investigate interventions for neurodegenerative disease. Attempts to suture together the ends of damaged neurons in the peripheral nervous system date back to the seventh century. Through his experiments on frogs, British physiologist Augustus Waller described in detail what happens to a peripheral nerve after injury. Over time physicians learned that some peripheral nerve injuries are more conducive to repair than others. Even today many peripheral nerve injuries remain difficult to treat, and scientists are striving to better understand the mechanisms of regeneration to facilitate healing.

This Just In:
How Plastics Went from a Sustainability Solution to an Environmental Crisis
NEWS | 01 September 2025
There were only so many elephants, tortoises and silkworms to go around, and their tusks, shells and fibers were increasingly in demand. Articles and advertisements from the early era of the plastics industry portray such materials as relieving pressure on natural resources. The billiard ball and other reinforced polymer composites were predecessors to commercial plastics. The solution to one environmental sustainability problem has become one of the biggest and most intractable environmental crises of our time. As Rebecca Altman wrote in a 2021 article in Science, celluloid “purportedly spared the elephant, especially from the billiard ball industry.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 01 September 2025
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Today:
We Thought DNA Ran Our Lives until We Discovered RNA Is in Charge
NEWS | 01 September 2025
But in recent years researchers have discovered a dizzying array of “noncoding” RNA (ncRNA) molecules that do something other than ferry DNA instructions for proteins. This shift in thinking has been “revolutionary,” says Thomas Cech, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman for discovering RNA molecules, called ribozymes, that can catalyze biochemical reactions. But it’s inert—it can’t do anything without its children, RNA and proteins.”RNA is created when an enzyme called RNA polymerase reads a DNA sequence and builds a corresponding RNA molecule—a process known as transcription. These functions turn the popular central dogma, which was a one-way street from DNA to mRNA to proteins, into an open system with information flowing in all directions among DNA, proteins, cells and organism. “Textbooks 25 years ago confidently stated that RNA consisted of messenger RNA, transfer RNA and ribosomal RNA,” Cech says.

Top Stories:
Physicists Finally Know How the Strong Force Gets Its Strength
NEWS | 01 September 2025
The strongest force in the universe is called, aptly, the strong force. Despite knowing roughly how it compares with the other forces, scientists don’t know precisely how strong the strong force is. So despite its importance to nuclear physics and building the material world, the strong force is not unconditionally loved by researchers. Instead many look at the domain where the strong force is truly strong as a “Terra Damnata,” a realm to avoid at all costs. In fact, the strong force accounts for the origin of around 99 percent of the mass in the visible universe.

World:
Tomorrow's Quantum Computers Threaten Today's Secrets. Here's How to Protect Them
NEWS | 01 September 2025
It solicited ideas for “post-quantum” or “quantum-resistant” cryptography—codes that can run on today’s computers but are so robust that not even quantum computers could break them. “At the time quantum computers seemed like they were way, way far in the future,” Shor says. By hovering between the two states, qubits enable quantum computers to perform certain tasks much faster than classical computers. (Confusingly, “quantum cryptography” refers to something else—using quantum phenomena as part of the security scheme.) To protect quantum computers' fragile behavior, facilities must keep them isolated from their environments and supercooled.

Current Events:
Quantum Weirdness in New 'Strange Metals' Bends the Rules of Physics
NEWS | 01 September 2025
To see why strange metals are strange, let’s first consider how regular metals work. Strange metals present an apparent failure of one of the most successful physics models of solids. At the temperatures of our experiments, between three and 10 kelvins, this material is very much in the strange metal regime. Strange metals present an apparent failure of one of the most successful physics models of solids. Scientists have observed superconductivity emerging in multiple families of strange metals at relatively high temperatures.